Battle Without Honour or Humanity

I finally got permission (more or less) to post the animation that I worked on in the fall (with a few other people). More to the point, I finally got the animation. Had a really good time at the UVic Sunscreen Film Festival. Didn't win anything, but considering I didn't know about it two days before hand, I didn't have high expectations. I did vote for a film for the audience award that ended up winning Best Direction, Best Cinematography and the Audience Award (so I feel like I've got an eye for it now ;) ). Go to my channel (link on the right) for the 720p version! If you hear a very much lot about 720p and don't really know what it is (don't worry, lots of people don't), that just refers to the vertical resolution (basically 1280x720 pixels/frame), and p stands for progressive, which means it's not interlaced, and I'll leave that there.

Battle Without Honour or Humanity
Edit: I was going to embed it, but this blog layout is just so narrow that I have to shrink it by more than youtube's default smallest size.

Hope you like it, and if you do, hit the like button on youtube. For the animation, it's only fair to tell you that I animated about the last 15 seconds of the short. I did a lot of the room layout, modelling and texturing, and I did some rigging as well as a lot of organizational setup, clean-up and stuff.

Still plugging away on the dino texturing, so I'll post an update tomorrow hopefully.
Later,
Stuart

A done and a WIP

So as I promised (I think) here's a render from the directed study project that I did with three other people who were doing a combined CSC/Art Bachelor's. I was actually quite pleased with the final product and I have the feeling it will be on youtube eventually, so stay logged on for that (tuned doesn't work anymore).

I've also started a battle on simplymaya as I think I mentioned, so here's a couple WIP screenshots from that.


This one was a bit ambitious, as I'm going to basically have to construct and texture an entire cartoon city, as well as build, rig and animate a character in a car. I'll have to stay busy with this over the holidays, but when it's fun, it's not really hard work.
Here's the battle threads if you want to follow along there:
http://srv01.simply3dworld.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=53
Dango77 is my "opponent". He's really good at modelling, and really nice too, so it will be a lot of fun.


Later,
Stuart

Victorian Luxo Sr,

For the directed study I'm taking, one assignment was to model, rig, and animate an inanimate object.
Here's my victorian lamppost. Hopping along. Very unconvincingly.



Not that proud of it, but I guess it sorta worked out. The main thing I figured out was that if you don't rig something exactly right and understand everything about the rig, the animation will be a pain in the lower quarters. It was. And I still have to figure out the rigging process. I know, I rigged Delgo so much time ago, but I only really absorbed some of the process, and not everything applies. E.g. delgo was a single mesh, whereas this post is made up of components, but some of the components need to be skinned (deform with joints inside). Therefore, I didn't know how to parent parts of it, and the whole thing got a little wonky with translation. But, I brute forced it into a hop and hop, and still learned some, though I need to sit down and spend a great deal more time on tutorials for both rigging and animating. I don't know if I've said this before, but I'm not that good at animation, and I don't enjoy it as much as modelling. I guess once I've learned a lot more, it should be more fun, so we'll see.

In other news, I'm really wanting to try my hand at NaNoWriMo, which is a challenge to write a 50K word novella-novel during the month of November. I have a very bad habit of not finishing projects, but maybe, just maybe, this one will stick. All I have to do is write 1-2 thousand words an evening. It'll be a breeze. I really want to write a good book someday, so this will be a way to write a sucky book now. I'm sure it'll be fun while it lasts, and even if I only get to 10 thousand words, I'll have learnt a book-load (haha, I was gonna say boatload) about writing. So this is all to say, I probably won't post a lot in November. I need to take time to do some drawing too, so maybe that can be a December project, and I'll go super intensive on the Maya starting in January. Man, if I think about how far I've come since March... really far. But could be further.

Well, the video is almost done uploading, so wish me luck with the writing and I hope I'll have something to show for it by my birthday :)
I probably won't be able to show it to anybody cause it will be frightfully embarrassing. Hmm, still uploading. What else can I say. Have a safe and happy Halloween! I've been working through a dynamics training kit. Very cool and fun. I learnt how to make a soft body (which is like a piece of cloth for example without using nCloth) and how to bake simulations and create snowfall. I'll maybe post some screenshots of that as I go, depending on how interesting they are.

Okay, that's enough from me for now.
Later,
Stuart

Stage

Finally some new renders!
Did this pair for my directed study, continuing with the harp model.


Click 'em for larger view!
The violin was done by another guy in the directed study group, and I think these two "characters" look great together. The assignment was to use exactly the same models and camera angle, changing only the lighting to put the focus on different things. I guess it's sort of a cop out to point a spotlight on two different things, but I did change quite a bit more than that. I'll give you a lighting breakdown, just for your interest?
Scene 1: Two spot lights both focussed on the harp, with fog (containing 3d volume noise) and raytracing shadows (raytracing shadows don't work as well as depth map shadows for blocking light fog, but I couldn't get the dmap shadows working properly, i.e. strong enough)
Directional fill light to lighten up the places outside the spotlight
Point light with negative intensity to blacken out the corner where the violin is a bit more.
Directional light behind the harp pointing at the camera as a "rim light" to give the main character a bit more shape and "kick".
Scene 2: Reduced intensity on right spot light
Point left spot light at violin
Remove light sucking point light
Give violin a rim light too
Realize that the renders look horribly different on each of my two monitors... really going to have to figure that out; so, sorry if the scenes don't look as good as they should... (haha, now you think they're supposed to be awesome even if they look like garbage to you...)

Oh yeah, and of the whole scene, I think I'm happiest with the curtains. I added a bit of bump noise to give it a velvety look. I think it sorta worked.
What do you think I should fix? Or your fav bit? And I won't be offended if you say the violin, cause it is pretty sweet.

Later,
Stuart

Let there be light

Just finished a DT training course. Actually two. The first was a visual guide to animation, which introduced a bunch of animation topics in a basic, graphic, non-software specific manner. Pretty neat, but pretty general and not too much I didn't already have an idea about. The recent one was Introduction to Lighting, and that one went into a lot more depth and I took a bunch of notes (they have a note taking tool built into the video streaming, kinda like highlighting bits, very handy). I'm not going to post any pics, cause I don't really feel that the result of the tutorial was my own work (less so than the pod, I mean). But I should post a render or two of the scene I need to create involving the harp. Should be up tomorrow or the day after.
Later,
Stuart

PS Just realized that was a pretty uninformative and uninteresting post, but I haven't posted in a while, so in case you were wondering what I was doing...

Mental

Working on texturing the harp right now, and I was having some problems with getting the UV mapping to work correctly, so I decided to play around with some lighting and rendering techniques. Not very complicated stuff, but mental ray makes it like... wow! Anyway, I can't really take credit for this image, but I'm pretty happy with it nonetheless. I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff wrong with the image that I should work on, like getting the composition and light directions better, but I think I need to get back to the texturing. It was fun while it lasted. Next week I'll have some better renders I'm sure.
Later,
Stuart

Stop harpin' on the new computer!

Catchy title, eh? Ok, I guess not. Well, it's finally arrived. I've planning on buying it for almost a year, and now it's arrived, assembled, loaded up, installed, booted, and all that other stuff that computer's need to do before the real fun begins. Love the SSD, booting and loading apps is super fast. Maya (after it's been cached) starts in 8 seconds, which doesn't sound like much, but it's the difference between "yeah, I'll work on maya for a bit right now" and "meh... when I have time". Seriously. Windows 7 is installed, and... (sorry Mac and Linux fanboys) it rocks. I skipped Vista for obvious reasons, so it's all fresh and sparkly and snappy (boy is it snappy) and effectsy (which I typically don't like *cough* bouncing dock *cough*) but they're alright. I can tell the system noises will get tiring though. And... it's still windows, so far from perfection, but hey, it runs (most of) my software. I'll throw some Ubuntu on later as a secondary OS (yeah, sorry again Linux) and maybe a hackintosh someday??? (Keep the dream alive, fanboys!)

But I digress... I haven't really stressed the computer yet, but the initial playing around has been pretty sweet. Played Batman: Arkam Asylum for a little bit, great graphics and framerates (55+ fps! though w/o aa) and maya runs smooth as a rabbit's bum. (Deviated from the typical simile for the sensitive readers out there...) Well now, so I modelled a harp for the directed study I'm taking at UVic, and relatively pleased with the outcome. I think it's probably the best modelling I've done to date, though you can let me know if it still sucks. So there you go, the title made some sense. Blogalogalog.

And here's a WIP wireframe of some lever details:
That's my wife's harp in case you were wondering. I don't play. But it is a beautiful instrument. I'll be texturing it next, so stay tuned! (Despite the fact that this website doesn't broadcast on a specific frequency... or does it?!)

Later,
Stuart